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This is exactly the problem with Rationalists. Everybody understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified

This is exactly the problem with Rationalists. *Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect. It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it.

dale_glass 3y ago
I don't see that as a problem. Heuristics are for when you need to make quick decisions. Heuristics are for when you're wondering whether there might be a tiger hiding behind that bush. You're forced to make a snap decision, you can't just rationally evaluate everything, examine the environment and come to the right conclusion. And if you're not paranoid enough some day a tiger might get you. Even a large amount of error is acceptable when your life might depend on it, and an action must be taken now. When we're on a web forum, sitting in a comfortable chair, drinking coffee and not in any kind of hurry to decide one way or another whether something is a good idea, heuristics are harmful and prevent us from reaching correct conclusions.
- nullstyle 3y ago
  > Heuristics are for when you need to make quick decisions. Heuristics are also for when you have too much information to handle in one thought process.
ben_w 3y ago
I will quite happily say that I also think utilitarianism is bad, but not because of the founder. I think it's bad because it comes across as someone discovering basic numeracy as an adult and going "what happens if we treat happiness as a countable object and do basic adding up on it?", and then never gets past either of two major stumbling blocks: (1) how do you compare the happiness of two different people, and (2) there's a lot more to maths than adding things up, important maths at that, such as "when is it OK to treat discrete things as continuums and when is this a bad idea?" and "do you really want to say that m people who are n happy is the same value as one person who is m*n happy, or is there some kind of discounting for bigger values like there seems to be with the utility of money going down as people get richer?" > *Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect. The main thing with Rationalists is that they recognise everyone's thinking is suspect. > It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it. I grew up in the UK, with a prime minister who promoted what she thought were "Victorian Values". Amongst other various things, when she went to see Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, she was informed of Mozart's scatological humour and is reported to have responded thusly: """She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... "I don't think you heard what I said", replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that". I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart's letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minister said I was wrong, so wrong I was.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology Lord Byron is also famous both for his poetry and for bringing a pet bear to his university accommodation to spite the rules about no dogs. There's weird anecdotes about virtually every famous figure, 'cause humans are weird.
- leashless 3y ago
  Bentham's mummification is a Brown M&Ms story. Once you see that in his life the result of Utilitarianism was mummification in an era where that was batshit there's kind of a long pause and a "recheck everything" and oooh look its full of utility monsters and all sorts of other naive garbage which somehow we are expected to take seriously. Point and laugh is the right response. Not 600 page rebuttals.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > utility monsters are specifically a criticism of utilitarianism, the people taking them seriously are doing so to say "and therefore utilitarianism is wrong". Also, did you… fail to notice that I was also describing utilitarianism as naive, just without using that specific word? Because I was. > mummification in an era where that was batshit It was also an era when being gay or an atheist or supporting equal rights for women or ending slavery was "batshit". And today we have Elon Musk, who many regard as batshit, but hey, SpaceX exists and probably wouldn't have gotten this far without him (it's not like the other billionaires in the new space race did any better than the old rocket companies they're trying to displace). "Batshit" is a trivial, playground, insult. Even when it's true, it doesn't count for much, because it's so broad.
    - leashless 3y ago
      Mummification. On a bet. With the motivation being to demonstrate utility. That is seriously enough to recheck everything because it seems to have blown up the founder. And if it does this to him, what's it gonna do to us? It does not need to be more complicated than this.
      - gqcwwjtg 3y ago
        Seems like the main negative utility it created is people like you deciding it’s more important than the concept of comparing potential outcomes for how good they are. > And if it does this to him, what’s it going to do to us? Is this serious? It did him no harm.
psd1 3y ago
I'm happy to use heuristics, but Victorian England also included uncomfortable starched collars and crinolines; having yourself mummified is not a great deviation. Fortunately you and I live in an age where we dispose of each other's dead meat by incinerating it, which is absolutely sane and logical. Thinking should always be automatically suspect. Wetware isn't very good at it. That's why heuristics are a good idea: if we reason about whether or not someone's opus is correct, we can end up confidently wrong.
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  > I'm happy to use heuristics, but Victorian England also included uncomfortable starched collars and crinolines; having yourself mummified is not a great deviation. Oh, but it was. Wearing a starched collar in Victorian England did not make you a weirdo by the standard of the times, while having yourself mummified did. I personally like people who are a little weird, but I don't pretend that they're not weird. And yes, a lot of human behavior seems weird when seen from a distance.

This is exactly the problem with Rationalists. *Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified

dale_glass 3y ago

I don't see that as a problem. Heuristics are for when you need to make quick decisions. Heuristics are for when you're wondering whether there might be a tiger hiding behind that bush. You're forced to make a snap decision, you can't just rationally evaluate everything, examine the environment and come to the right conclusion. And if you're not paranoid enough some day a tiger might get you. Even a large amount of error is acceptable when your life might depend on it, and an action must be taken now. When we're on a web forum, sitting in a comfortable chair, drinking coffee and not in any kind of hurry to decide one way or another whether something is a good idea, heuristics are harmful and prevent us from reaching correct conclusions.

nullstyle 3y ago
> Heuristics are for when you need to make quick decisions. Heuristics are also for when you have too much information to handle in one thought process.

ben_w 3y ago

I will quite happily say that I also think utilitarianism is bad, but not because of the founder. I think it's bad because it comes across as someone discovering basic numeracy as an adult and going "what happens if we treat happiness as a countable object and do basic adding up on it?", and then never gets past either of two major stumbling blocks: (1) how do you compare the happiness of two different people, and (2) there's a lot more to maths than adding things up, important maths at that, such as "when is it OK to treat discrete things as continuums and when is this a bad idea?" and "do you really want to say that m people who are n happy is the same value as one person who is m*n happy, or is there some kind of discounting for bigger values like there seems to be with the utility of money going down as people get richer?" > *Everybody* understands that when the founder of a Thing does something as daffy as Having Themselves Mummified in Victorian England the rest of their thinking is automatically suspect. The main thing with Rationalists is that they recognise everyone's thinking is suspect. > It's the kind of informal heuristic which is almost never wrong. We should not ignore it. I grew up in the UK, with a prime minister who promoted what she thought were "Victorian Values". Amongst other various things, when she went to see Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, she was informed of Mozart's scatological humour and is reported to have responded thusly: """She was not pleased. In her best headmistress style, she gave me a severe wigging for putting on a play that depicted Mozart as a scatological imp with a love of four-letter words. It was inconceivable, she said, that a man who wrote such exquisite and elegant music could be so foul-mouthed. I said that Mozart's letters proved he was just that: he had an extraordinarily infantile sense of humour ... "I don't think you heard what I said", replied the Prime Minister. "He couldn't have been like that". I offered (and sent) a copy of Mozart's letters to Number Ten the next day; I was even thanked by the appropriate Private Secretary. But it was useless: the Prime Minister said I was wrong, so wrong I was.""" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology Lord Byron is also famous both for his poetry and for bringing a pet bear to his university accommodation to spite the rules about no dogs. There's weird anecdotes about virtually every famous figure, 'cause humans are weird.

leashless 3y ago
Bentham's mummification is a Brown M&Ms story. Once you see that in his life the result of Utilitarianism was mummification in an era where that was batshit there's kind of a long pause and a "recheck everything" and oooh look its full of utility monsters and all sorts of other naive garbage which somehow we are expected to take seriously. Point and laugh is the right response. Not 600 page rebuttals.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > utility monsters are specifically a criticism of utilitarianism, the people taking them seriously are doing so to say "and therefore utilitarianism is wrong". Also, did you… fail to notice that I was also describing utilitarianism as naive, just without using that specific word? Because I was. > mummification in an era where that was batshit It was also an era when being gay or an atheist or supporting equal rights for women or ending slavery was "batshit". And today we have Elon Musk, who many regard as batshit, but hey, SpaceX exists and probably wouldn't have gotten this far without him (it's not like the other billionaires in the new space race did any better than the old rocket companies they're trying to displace). "Batshit" is a trivial, playground, insult. Even when it's true, it doesn't count for much, because it's so broad.
  - leashless 3y ago
    Mummification. On a bet. With the motivation being to demonstrate utility. That is seriously enough to recheck everything because it seems to have blown up the founder. And if it does this to him, what's it gonna do to us? It does not need to be more complicated than this.
    - gqcwwjtg 3y ago
      Seems like the main negative utility it created is people like you deciding it’s more important than the concept of comparing potential outcomes for how good they are. > And if it does this to him, what’s it going to do to us? Is this serious? It did him no harm.

psd1 3y ago

I'm happy to use heuristics, but Victorian England also included uncomfortable starched collars and crinolines; having yourself mummified is not a great deviation. Fortunately you and I live in an age where we dispose of each other's dead meat by incinerating it, which is absolutely sane and logical. Thinking should always be automatically suspect. Wetware isn't very good at it. That's why heuristics are a good idea: if we reason about whether or not someone's opus is correct, we can end up confidently wrong.

Turing_Machine 3y ago
> I'm happy to use heuristics, but Victorian England also included uncomfortable starched collars and crinolines; having yourself mummified is not a great deviation. Oh, but it was. Wearing a starched collar in Victorian England did not make you a weirdo by the standard of the times, while having yourself mummified did. I personally like people who are a little weird, but I don't pretend that they're not weird. And yes, a lot of human behavior seems weird when seen from a distance.